Semi-OT: David Foster Wallace and "The Horror"

A couple years ago, the term 'round these parts for Appalachian State's upset victory over Michigan was coined: The Horror. The 2007 Oregon game because The Horror II.

As I'm reading David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays," I came across an essay entitled "The View From Mrs. Thompson's." This refers to the events of September 11, 2001, as "The Horror."

I remember Brian mentioning that he was a fan of David Foster Wallace, so is "The Horror" taken from this essay? Is it just a coincidence?

Additionally, if there are any Wallace fans here, what is your favorite book of his? I tried reading "Oblivion" several years ago and couldn't really stand it, but I'm older and more mature now, and "Consider the Lobster" is agreeing with me.

I'm also in the process of reading "The Magicians" by Lev Grossman, "The All Pro Diet" by Tony Gonzalez, and "The Tragedy of Macbeth" by some guy I've never heard of. I'm that guy with a giant stack of books next to his bed and a different bookmarked novel in each room.

He edited an anthology of essays, Best American Essays of 2007, and did a David Foster Wallace kind of job. The first essay was unforgettable. I think he may have contributed as well. But it's interesting to see what he thought of as good writing.

collection is very fine, in my opinion. Not a huge fan of the endless footnoting in general by DFW, but plenty of people I respect dig it. He wrote an essay on tennis (for Esquire, maybe?) about 10 -12 years ago that was pretty awesome, as I recall.

EDIT: a quick Google reveals the essay title as “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornados.” (appeared in Harper's in '92) and later anthologized as “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”... published 18 years ago ... sheesh, I'm old.

As far as his non-fiction goes, I think I prefer A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again to Consider the Lobster. The titular essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing, about DFW's experience on a cruise liner, is pretty fantastic. Though I'm not a huge fan of the game, I really love his tennis stuff, too. I forget what collection it's in, but his essay on the tennis player Matt Joyce does a great job of getting across the enormous skill gaps between the best few players in the world, the 100th best player, and some guy who used to play competitively and still thinks he's pretty nice. He also wrote a great essay on Roger Federer at Wimbledon for the NY Times a few years ago, and I'm sure you can still find it online.

Also good is "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" (which according to Wikipedia appeared in Harper's in 1994 under the title "Ticket to the Fair") and which is several days' worth of observations on the Illinois State Fair.

Edited to add: the second essay I mentioned can also be found in "The Next American Essay," which is a really good anthology for those who enjoy creative nonfiction. That's all.

A fun Michigan football related read is Chuck Klosterman's "Eating the Dinosaur." One of the chapters discusses how we destroyed Minnesota in 2008 despite being awful. Not comparing Klosterman to Wallace; Klosterman is just a fun read, but I was ecstatic that a chapter was sort of about Michigan football.

I came across it as a result of my respect for Dave Eggers--he wrote the foreword of my edition.

My only problem with IJ is that my life isn't particularly conducive to multi-week festivals of self-neglect, the likes of which require (and, because the book is sorta sybaritically sublime, frankly *deserves*) that I...

Moving forward: I started it before the holiday break and--insert cardinal sin here (oh, the ignominiousness!)--had to stop after a hundred or so pages of self-absorbed bliss (roughly November, Year of the Adult Depend Undergarment).

It was barely post-pubescent of me to quit "cuz it's tough and long." I can deal with that brand of shame. Not that it makes it seem more forgivable, but the book was simply owning too much of my life. Introspective self-surrender is the sort of thing I'm generally quite alright with--just not during "Neuroanatomy and Neurophysiology." Sister-flipping priorities, right? Flip that.

I hope to start over from the beginning in a little less than two months. Until then, I'll have to keep amused with shorter pieces. Walden, Self-reliance, and Leaves of Grass are the new objects whose companionship I obsequiously ponder. Though that sentence does appear to be some damned dirty dilettantism, I must say I love me some existential transcendentalism**.

All your "personal truths are more real than objective truths" are belong to me.

**(even though I'm pretty confident the post-modernists' view of the internal forces of society--as a socio-economic spiderweb of shackles predispositionally cementing the average individual to achieve little more than mere continuation of the path of his/her peers--better characterizes the mechanism by which the life of your average Everyman unfolds. [I admit I'm dabbling in gross generalizations of the members of an academic movement, by the way.] The post-modernists may have been more right, in my opinion. However, they sure as hell weren't chipper. As it turns out, I like me some smiles, too).